Hi there,
To begin with, I’m french and I hope it will be readable for you guys
I have not played this game for 3 years, I’m currently leveling a Warlord following Superfluff build but I really want to play a “sniper” build and I didn’t find any recent build that suits me.
So I started to think of making one using grimtools build calculator, trying to make a Tactician with Valdun set, something similar to this old build I found 10 min ago : https://www.grimdawn.com/forums/showthread.php?t=80101
Sadly I don’t have the knowledge to make a full build and to know if it will be able or not to be endgame viable.
But I know what I want to achieve : Sniper. To me a character wearing a big Rifle, landing heavy crits, no pets, surely a glass canon build, mainly auto attacker with procs and no offensive spells (I mean “magical” spells).
I need advise on where to start ? Class combination for example, inquisitor/soldier seems fine but I see more magical spells than ranged weapon spells in inquisitor tree.
Does heavy pierce damage build works well now ? From what I saw on older threads, it was not a good damage type.
Another question is how will I survive ? Was thinking of a shield absorb and/or a slow proc on auto attacks to kite but I didn’t find any.
There are too many legendary items now I’m completely lost, so I’m asking you buildmakers where would you start to make a build like that ?
I wanted to add a big thanks to all buildmakers here, Grim Dawn has an awesome community I’m happy to see it’s still alive as it was 3 years ago
Pierce is somewhat underwhelming damage type for gunner mainly dew to low amount of supported legendaries and underwhelment of cadence as an attack replacer.
Tactician would work decent. I have my own tactician in late epics, however I kinda found her boring. In solder you generally want 1 point in basic cadence and 12/12 in second skill(for 100% chance to penetrate enemies), several points in squad tacticsfor all it goodies. For inquisitor 7 points in storm spread absolute mast have(good shotgun wps, with two handed rifle provide 8 missles at once, you want it to trigger as often as possible), inquisitor seal(thats one of the greatest defencive skill. Drop it on the floor and stay in it), ranged expertice and deadly aim. For exclusive skill there is inquisitor blue aura(at least my experience advice it). In devotions you absolutely need assassin blade, ulzaad and that sand girl devotions.
Look careful at your equipment, you absolutely dont want to push chance for wps above 100%.
However you never played a gunner before I’d advice you to go with vindicator instead using two handed rifle with transmuted primal strike. He is stupifyingly survivable with both seal and wendigo totem. However you’d have to get box skill from inquisitor since primal strike cant trigger wps thus you’ll need some additional spell to bind devotions to.
I personally think that seal benefits more from stationary build like ranged or spamming spells than melee.Also in most ranged builds you have bonuses to seal and you can easily put a lot of points there,but yeah seal is also for melee and life steal is universal method of survival for any auto attacker.For pierce you get the benefit of having Seal of blades,which increased life steal by 5%.That combined with ghoul and restless remain in gloves or toad will grant you decent percentage.Also one can use arcane barrier from Crab for elemental gunner or pierce with conversion from pack of treacherous means or bladestwister ring.In that case Phoenix is possible too,for extra absorb.
